


let us live it gesture by gesture

by basketofnovas (slashmarks)



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Gen, Pre-Canon, Pregnancy, Slavery, Visions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-12
Updated: 2019-08-12
Packaged: 2020-08-11 00:04:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,158
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20144230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/slashmarks/pseuds/basketofnovas
Summary: For nine months, Shmi carried a child of the gods and she dreamed.





	let us live it gesture by gesture

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Shadaras](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shadaras/gifts).

> I hope my recipient enjoys this work! The idea of Shmi being temporarily Force sensitive grabbed me when I sat down to write.
> 
> General warning for no specific on screen violence, but characters being frank about the realities of slavery.
> 
> Title with thanks to [At the River Clarion](https://thevalueofsparrows.com/2012/06/27/poetry-at-the-river-clarion-by-mary-oliver/) by Mary Oliver.

For nine months, Shmi carried a child of the gods and she dreamed.

The first one came towards the end of those early morning hours when she was finally allowed to sleep. Shmi was back at the winter camp site on the other side of Tatooine, from before - everything. She breathed in the bantha wool--tinged air from the tent walls and the steam of the tisane of purple flowers sprung up of winter rain over the fire, and it seemed that it had all been a mistake, just somebody's terrible mistake. 

She was home again, and nineteen years old and going to marry - gods, she couldn't remember her name anymore; the girl with the blue checked cloak and the clever smile. They'd been a season or so away from being able to afford the wedding, when it happened.

In fact she must be marrying tonight because her mother was with her, braiding her hair, and her sister was painting blue lines on her hands, and they were singing outside, she could hear them. But they did not sing the bridal songs, they did not sing with voices human or Tusken, they did not sing in words at all but a chorus of sobs and sighs that roused something in her long sleeping. It was like tears long held back.

Her sister laced Shmi's blue-lined fingers with her own and looked into her face, and it wasn't her sister at all. Shmi could not think when she woke what she saw in the woman's face but it was not her sister with her and it was not her mother braiding her hair; but the bantha hair tent was the same one she'd been raised in.

"You will give birth to a child," said the woman who was not her mother but had her mother's touch exactly on Shmi's hair, and the voice was terrible and great.

"He will come in nine months," said the woman who was not her sister.

"Who will the father be?" said Shmi, in the dream.

"The one whose hand is tied to yours," said the woman who was not her mother; and they dressed her for her wedding and they led her out in procession to no wedding tent and no partner at all but the rocky peak that climbed above the winter camp site, where they laid out her bed.

"Am I a sacrifice?" Shmi asked. There were stories about what people had once done, old stories, older than Tatooine. They were told as horror stories, but there was no fear in her in the dream. Shmi had long ago stopped fearing death.

"A vessel," the woman who was not her mother said. She stood always behind Shmi; now her hands rested on her shoulders as Shmi looked out over the barren desert. At dawn, the light would show her the flowers brought by each winter's handful of rains. "Love the child, but he is not yours."

"They're never yours," the woman who was not Shmi's sister said.

"This one less than most. You'll know when the time comes for him to go."

They left her then, waiting on the mountain peak for - for the god, she supposed. She lay out on the bedroll finally and spread her head back and her arms and legs wide, thinking, this is not a bad wedding night: I have never come here before at night, and there are so many stars.

Something did come for her then but she couldn't remember it when she woke. 

If everything _was_ just a mistake, if she had been back home, she would have asked her mother to interpret the dream. If her mother didn't know they'd have gone to her great aunt who had lived longer than just about anyone and owned a full three banthas on her own and had once been paid a prince's ransom in stored water to tell the future for a Hutt and therefore saved the whole camp in a bad year.

But all of them were dead except the young women and girls who'd been sold like Shmi and a couple of the young boys as well. Shmi was not nineteen and almost married but a thirty-seven year old slave owned primarily for her expertise at getting the run down, chewed up speeders and bikes and occasional weirder stuff that got sold second hand in Mos Elna to actually work, at least until the customers got them off the lot. She hadn't had sex with a man in years, since she aged out of the last of the brothels and was sold on again. She put it out of her mind until her period was late, and only briefly thought of it then. She had so little to eat most of the time and was run so ragged that she was often very late. 

Then she missed her second period and she gave up and counted out her cached savings. They were made up of bribes from customers to tell them which speeders actually ran and earnings from selling on used caf grounds and oil and basically anything she could take from around the shop without notice. Her family hadn't raised her to steal but you had to if you didn't want to starve to death on what the masters gave you here, and anyway every one of _them_ had stolen _her_ so she figured she'd a right to it. She spent a painful portion of them at the chemist's on a pregnancy test she believed would actually work. 

Many of the women had folk aides for it but if Shmi was going to tell her owner she was pregnant she wanted to be damn sure it was true. Her mother had raised her to interpret dreams, yes, but also to practice modern medicine when available.

Unfortunately in this case the modern medicine confirmed the dream.

"Who's the father?" Jalina asked

It was nearly three hours past the middle of the night and Shmi wanted desperately to be asleep in her quarters in the shop attic. They were cramped, but they were also private because her owner went home at night, a rare commodity for slaves, and she knew she had to be up about the minute the first sun rose. Most humans on Tatooine were borderline nocturnal, unable to bear the suns, and for that reason the shop was open very late at night and Shmi had to staff it. Most other species on Tatooine were awake and about during the day since they were largely better adapted to the heat and the suns, and so the shop was open all day and Shmi had to staff it. She got about four hours of sleep on a good night.

But if she didn't see people other than the customers and the owners she'd go crazy; either spitting and screaming, rage-take-you crazy that got you beaten or killed, or the worse kind, the other one where you forgot you were really a person who'd been stolen and not a thing and acted like your owner had the right to you. The kind they called "well trained" at auction.

And right now she desperately needed those other people's advice, which was why she was here and not in her bed. Here, in the tiny and run down caf house that catered to working humans in this district and accordingly stayed open all night, paying more than she could afford in time or money to sip out of a chipped cup next to her closest friends in the living world.

"I don't know," Shmi said. "I haven't slept with a man in years."

Jalina and Tovi and Priya exchanged glances over her head, which annoyed her. "My sweet," Priya said. "If we need to go after somebody with a crowbar--"

Shmi's owner was of a species which could not generally get humans pregnant, which obviously simplified this plan.

"No, I'm not telling you someone raped me, I mean it," Shmi said. "I can't explain what happened. But let me tell you, I had this dream."

Reactions to the dream were mixed. She couldn't make it sound the way it had felt, not after months of losing the details, but she had remembered most of the words or at least enough that her mind could fill in the gaps. Priya was a skeptic - Priya had been kidnapped off a space voyage that was going to take her to university in the Core on scholarship, a fact which she never shut up about - and predictably kept annoying Shmi for the father's name after. Jalina seemed uncertain but willing to take Shmi's word for the last on it.

Tovi said, "My people do the dream thing too, I just don't remember anything about it. I wish I could help." Like most male slaves who hadn't been born to it, Tovi had been a child when he was taken and remembered very little except for his name and other fragments. He clung to what he did remember, so she knew this meant he would believe her wholeheartedly.

"Do you want to get rid of it?" Priya asked, unmoved by the fact that it was probably a child of the gods. "We'll all help you pay for it. Just tell me you won't take that horrible stuff the man who works in the red roofed grocery makes, it smells like tar and I know a woman who died after she tried to use it."

"I don't know," Shmi said, because Priya asking the question gave her room to think about it. "I think I'd like to have a child, but they'll probably sell it."

"They probably will," Jalina said.

"But it's _prophesied_," Tovi said, but then he could not really be expected to understand the whole thing the same way. Also he was sixteen, and he couldn't help that either.

"The dream said it wouldn't be yours," Jalina said. "Maybe it's meant to be sold. Or maybe it'll starve to death at six or be beaten to death for being mouthy at fifteen or get the vomiting sickness. You won't know until it happens."

"I won't know," Shmi agreed. "I need to think."

She went home and she paced in the attic instead of sleeping while the shop was empty below her. She imagined seeing her child led away from her at the market grounds; seeing her child's skull fractured; seeing her child's transmitter activated. She tried to talk herself into taking her friends' money and getting rid of it and she nearly succeeded half a dozen times, and when she hadn't succeeded or slept by the time the shop opened she knew she would keep it.

She had the second dream the next night. She was weaving in the gentle night time, the time for humans on Tatooine - at least, humans who accepted the planet as it was and didn't go around trying to batter it into something else. The sky was lightening slowly with first sunrise coming on, and the fire lit up the loom in front of her so she could see what she was making: a baby's blanket, swaddling clothes, with a border in blue to keep away the demons. She looked around the tent and saw that it was not her mother's, but her own. There was no wife or husband's things in the tent, no other children.

"Shmi," said the woman who was not her mother in the entry of the tent. Knowing that she could not look at her face or the dream would end, Shmi bent back towards the loom. She heard the flap open and shut and no footsteps, but the woman spoke again, closer. "He'll come in the winter, with the first rain."

"I understand," Shmi said. She was braiding tassels at the end of the blanket. She hadn't done this in eighteen years, and yet it came back like breathing - like breathing with broken ribs, stinging pain against every mouthful of air. "I'm going to need more food, and more sleep, to carry this child." She was already getting cuffed more often because she was slower. She'd thought she was just ill.

"We'll help you," the woman said, "While you carry the child. He is ours, and his blood is your blood."

"The placental membrane does not work like that," Shmi said. "And you know my owner may order me to get rid of it so I'm not laid up with it. Or sell it as soon as it's born."

The woman laughed. "Leave the details to us. Listen to your instincts. We'll tell you when it's safe to act."

Shmi woke up with the smell of the wool and the dye in her mouth and she successfully stole a speeder bike battery at work and blamed it on an unspecified customer. That should just about pay for prenatal vitamins for the rest of the pregnancy, she thought.


End file.
